For the first time since 2013, ransomware declined, down 20 percent overall, but up 12 percent for enterprises.

With a 90 percent plunge in the value of cryptocurrencies, cryptojacking fell 52 percent in 2018. Yet, cryptojacking remains popular due to a low barrier of entry and minimal overhead; Symantec blocked four times as many cryptojacking attacks in 2018 compared to the previous year.

Targeted Attackers Have an Appetite for Destruction

Hiding in plain sight: malicious PowerShell scripts up 1000%

Supply chain and Living off the Land (LotL) attacks are now a cyber crime mainstay: supply chain attacks ballooned by 78 percent in 2018.

Living off the land techniques allow attackers to hide inside legitimate processes. For example, the use of malicious PowerShell scripts increased by 1000 percent last year.

Attackers also increased their use of tried-and-true methods, like spear-phishing, to infiltrate organizations. While intelligence gathering remains their primary motive, attack groups using malware designed to destroy and disrupt business operations increased by 25 percent in 2018.

70 million records stolen from poorly configured S3 buckets

A single misconfigured cloud workload or storage instance could cost an organization millions or cause a compliance nightmare. In 2018, more than 70 million records were stolen or leaked from poorly configured S3 buckets. Off-the-shelf tools on the web allow attackers to identify misconfigured cloud resources.